Where the Light Fell

by Philip Yancey

I feel torn inside, torn between the gentle mother who hovers by my bedside when I get sick and the mother who punishes me when I least expect it. Sometimes her anger bursts without warning, like a summer thunderstorm. I can’t run to her without first checking her mood signs. At night when she tucks me in, is she cuddling, or clinging? Am I?

The year I’m attending seventh grade, 1961, the National Book Award goes to Walker Percy, a novelist from Mississippi. When a reporter asks him why the South has produced so many great writers, he replies, “Because we lost the War.” His answer applies to a lot of questions about the South. Winners may forget. Losers don’t. Atlanta has reminders everywhere. Marching bands play “Dixie” at high school football games. State buildings fly a Georgia flag that incorporates Robert E. Lee’s battle flag. Historical plaques about the Battle of Atlanta dot the city, and I often ask Mother to pull over and let me read them. To the east hulks the granite bulge called Stone Mountain, with its massive carving of three Confederate heroes. A loyal Southern boy, I devour books about the Civil War. About as many soldiers died in it, I learn, as in all the other wars in which the United States has fought combined. The Confederacy began the war outnumbered four to one and ended it with one-third of its soldiers dead. The North’s strategy of draining Southern blood, regardless of the cost, ultimately worked. With only ten thousand residents, Atlanta was not even the capital of the state in the 1860s; Milledgeville had that honor. But key railroad lines converged in Atlanta, and General Sherman knew that if he cut those supply routes, he would strangle the Confederate armies. Sherman wrote to his wife, “I begin to regard the death and mangling of a couple thousand men as a small affair, a kind of...

I read eyewitness accounts of slavery by Frederick Douglass and others who describe a cruelty I can barely comprehend. I wince at Civil War soldiers’ descriptions of corpses rotting in trench mud, of limbs sawn off with nothing to dull the pain, of a Georgia prison called Andersonville in which more Union soldiers died of starvation than had died in the North’s five bloodiest battles combined. Something seems to crumble inside me as I read these accounts, which stay with me like an afterimage. The Confederate army no longer seems so honorable, the Lost Cause no longer so just. The war may have loosened the shackles of slavery, but more than a century later the spirit of racial hostility lives on. I feel engulfed by a sense of revulsion, not only at what I once believed to be true but also at myself. Growing up, I swallowed the myth. Guilt denied never goes away. The South casts the war, as it casts almost everything, in religious language. Historian Shelby Foote tells of a Confederate monument in his hometown dedicated to “the only nation that lived and died without sin.” On one of my childhood pilgrimages I visited the Richmond grave of Jefferson Davis, which has this inscription carved in stone: “Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” That is the myth of the Lost Cause that I believed as a boy and through my adolescence. General Grant, who had seen the worst that war has to offer, expressed a different view at ...

I’ve heard people make comments like That’s just not my personality. I could never do that. I’m not that way. I resist all such thoughts. Camp and church have taught me that much of life consists of acting. Pray from the pulpit or give a tear-jerking testimony at camp, and suddenly you’re a spiritual giant. Do the opposite, and you’re a renegade. People judge by the outside—as long as you keep the inside well hidden.

At school, I observe other students like a waiter eavesdropping at a restaurant table. Who do people admire? I notice that wit has the same effect in a high school group as spiritual behavior does at church. I collect a few one-liners and jokes. Before long, friends appear. I listen intently to people’s stories, nodding sympathetically with apparent interest. I feel two-faced, but it gets results. For the first time, classmates seem to enjoy being around me.

“I had my back toward the light, and my face toward the things on which the light falls.” The Latin phrase dona bona, or “good gifts,” appears throughout his writings. “The world is a smiling place,” he writes, and God its largitor, or “lavisher of gifts.”

In search of more solitude, I begin taking daytime hikes in the forest surrounding the four-hundred-acre campus. Following railroad ties until I tire of the smell of creosote, I then detour into the deep woods, where the scent of honeysuckle hangs in the air like a woman’s perfume. The South Carolina landscape brings back memories of my boyhood explorations with a loyal dog at my side. One day, a glimmer of beauty catches my eye: a gold-studded chrysalis nestled among fallen leaves, cast aside for the birth of something even more resplendent. I reach down and hold the split cylinder in my hand. It seems art of the highest order, but for whom—and by whom? I come across a pond and sit there in stillness until the animals forget my presence. After ten minutes a snapping turtle crawls out to sun on a half-submerged log. A muskrat’s nose cuts v-shaped ripples in the pond’s glassy surface. I watch a spotted fawn approach the water, eyes and ears alert, and warily lower its head for a drink. A gangly blue heron, taller than a child, lands gently by the pond’s edge and wades in on stilt legs to stand at stiff attention. Just then I hear a deep bass croak and look up to see a fat green bullfrog, big as a catcher’s mitt, closing his wide-grin mouth. He jumps in the water with a loud splash; I flinch; and all the creatures disappear. They take my breath away, these brushstrokes of nature that happen whether or not any human is there to observe. “I have learnt to love you late, beauty...

Classes at the school focus so intently on the invisible world—on concepts such as omniscience, omnipotence, and sovereignty—but here in the visible world, at the margins of belief, I feel the first uninvited stirrings of desire to know the source of such beauty.

As G. K. Chesterton put it, “The worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank.” Nature teaches me nothing about Incarnation or the Victorious Christian Life. It does, though, awaken my des...

through the book Janet gave me, Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese. Among them I find one that reads: My own, my own, Who camest to me when the world was gone, And I who looked for only God, found thee! I would soon reverse that last line: “I who looked for only thee, found God!”

God hangs like a mist over the Bible-college campus—sung to, testified about, studied, feared. Yet for me, whether in family, church, or college, the motions of faith have always proved unreliable. I have proved unreliable. Too many times I have adopted the guise of a Christian, only to have the reality vanish like vapor.

And then it happens. In the middle of my prayer, as I am admitting my lack of care for our designated targets of compassion, the parable comes to me in a new light. I have been visualizing the scene as I speak: a swarthy Middle Eastern man, dressed in robes and a turban, bending over a dirty, blood-stained form in a ditch. Without warning, those two figures now morph on the internal screen of my mind. The Samaritan takes on the face of Jesus. The Jew, pitiable victim of a highway robbery, also takes on another face—one I recognize with a start as my own. In slow motion, I watch Jesus reach down with a moistened rag to clean my wounds and stanch the flow of blood. As he bends toward me, I see myself, the wounded victim of a crime, open my eyes and spit on him, full in the face. Just that. The image unnerves me—the apostate who doesn’t believe in visions or in biblical parables. I am rendered speechless. Abruptly, I stop praying, rise, and leave the room.

As I stand, I can see other students exchanging glances. I clear my throat a few times and begin. “C. S. Lewis once said that God sometimes shows grace by drawing us to himself while we kick and scream and pummel him with our fists. That is my story.”

“In the words of Job, ‘I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear. But now mine eye seeth thee: wherefore I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes.’

scores of my fellow students. Conversions only make sense from the inside out, to the fellow-converted. To the uninitiated they seem a mystery or a delusion.

don’t know,” I replied. “All I know is that the event happened, the surest event in my life, and one that I had neither planned nor orchestrated. I cannot possibly erase those moments from my life. I felt chosen.”

In the end, my resurrection of belief had little to do with logic or effort and everything to do with the unfathomable mystery of God.

Someone is there, I realized that winter night in a college dorm room. More, Someone is there who loves me. I felt the light touch of God’s omnipotence, the mere flick of a divine finger, and it was enough to set my life on a new course.

As a boy wandering in the woods, a teenager constructing a psychic survival shell, a lovesick college student running from the Hound of Heaven—in all those places I felt what T. S. Eliot called “a tremour of bliss, a wink of heaven, a whisper.” I came to love God out of gratitude, not fear. Above all else, grace is a gift, one I cannot stop writing about until my story ends.